Samuel AndersonManaging Partner, BevAssets, LLC · Just Pick Up The Phone 📞 | Joy 🦋 | Empowering individuals through meaningful connections, one person at a time.

Functional beverages. #beverages #freebird #winning #businessstrategy

6 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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1:26

In this conversational segment, two speakers discuss the functional beverage landscape, focusing on the water category. Speaker B critiques Liquid Death for overextending its brand by entering the energy‑drink space, suggesting the move signals a loss of focus and a mismatch with its core consumer who buys the product for its branding rather than functional benefits. Speaker A explains why a founder might choose to compete in the water market despite intense competition, arguing that water sales are fundamentally a branding exercise and that consumers are influenced more by brand perception than the product itself. The dialogue also touches on alternative functional drink ideas such as kombucha and mushroom‑infused beverages, highlighting the strategic considerations behind category selection.

That's true. That is true.
Yeah, that, that is, that's completely true. So let's talk about this, like, functional beverages, water beverages. A friend of mine posted something about Liquid Death today. Liquid Death seems to be losing their way. I'm just gonna say it.
They're—
I call it jump the shark. Now some people were like, Liquid Death's gonna come after me. I'm not saying it's a bad brand, but it seems like they're trying to be everything to everyone. And at some point now they're playing in energy drinks. And I think when you start playing in energy drinks, that's a different consumer. They're buying that for function. They're also buying it, you know, so they're not buying— Liquid Death wasn't that, but now they're playing in energy. So give me your thought around like kind of the water category. What makes you different and how do you, as a founder, how do you win in the category or how are you winning?
Yeah, well, you know, I get the question all the time, like, why of all categories would you go into water? And I said, well, because it's the biggest, you know, I'm not afraid of the competition because I know that selling water is a branding exercise. You know, most people aren't buying water for the water, even the ones that say they do. I'm not sure I always believe them, but that's fine. I think they're influenced by the brand. And so, you know, I could go into— we could have done kombucha or, you know, we could have done some sort of, you know, mushroom-infused drink or all these other things which are great.